Patches (Natural Selection 2)/Build 192
Released January 18, 2012 Changelog Features *Added map cycling on the server (now you can run ns2_tram!). Use mapcycle.txt file to set up. *Added Left 4 Dead style animated screen hints to make it more clear when marines should build structures, build power nodes, or guard power nodes. *Hitting marines with Gorge spit will obscure their view. Balance *Removed change in alien armor effectiveness with # of hives. This was supposed to work like NS1, but a recent meant that aliens got _weaker_ with more hives! Now it's gone completely. *Added 2 points of "hide" armor to Lerks (every attack does 2 less damage, good vs. groups). *Added a very small delay between a mine being armed and exploding (*BEEP* ... BOOM!!!). *Increased Fade carapace armor from 30 to 50. *Increased Gorge bile bomb damage from 200 to 300 and splash radius from 5 meters to 8 meters. *Increased Mature Whip health/armor from 900/150 to 1,050/175. *Increased Skulk carapace armor from 15 to 20. *Increased mine purchase cost from 10 to 15. *Increased minimum spawn time for eggs from 6 to 8, to try to allow marines to counter-rush after a failed attack (also to compensate for recent egg bug fix). *Lowered Gorge carapace armor from 60 to 50. *Lowered Robotics Factory build time from 30 to 25 to be less annoying and closer to other structures. *When players and structures are on fire, they recover energy at 25% normal rate (was 10% rate, which was very rough for Fade). *Personal resources have now a limit of 100 per player. Any overflow will be split amongst the other players on the team. *Whip bombs will not bounce off world geometry anymore. *Changed corrode damage to deal only a small amount to players armor instead of full damage. Fixes *A player will no longer be distress beaconed if they are close enough to the command station being beaconed to already. *Death messages for Players or Structures killed by Mines that were destroyed by other Mines will now display correctly. *Don't invoke collision callback if one of the objects has been destroyed. *Fixed bug where a client would not properly go back to the main menu when there was an error during connection (e.g. the client doesn't have the map). *Fixed bug where aliens used hive1 armor for 3+ hives and hive3 armor for 1 hive...(egads - thanks Jaweese!). *Fixed bug where clients would not be returned to the main menu if they failed to authenticate. *Fixed bug where grenades would explode too early depending on your ping time (OnCreate is now called in the world time stream instead of the lag compensated time stream). *Fixed bug where the game would not display the reason for being disconnect from a server when it returned to the main menu. *Fixed crash in PhysX on level change (caused by creating too many materials). *Fixed crash when too many reliable commands were sent at the same time. *Fixed packet format errors when too many mines explode simultaneously. *Fixed players not showing up in a server when viewed on Steam Friends. *Fixed prediction errors when using the speed command. *Fixed script error caused by giving a rally order to an unbuilt Hive. *Game freeze when placing cysts. *Mines detonate each other with some randomness now, for aesthetic effect(thanks Mats!). *Multiple Whips or ARCs can now be given a root/unroot or deploy/undeploy command. *No longer ignore damage types when calculating # of health points per point of alien armor. *Physics transform changes are detected even if they happen in a sub-step. *The Marine will only be slowed on landing if they jumped first (going down stairs will not artificially slow a player). *The sound effect that plays when distress beacon is finished will only trigger if at least 1 player was successfully beaconed. *Updated Lerk weapon spike and spore tooltips. *Viewer sometimes starts with black screen. *Whip bombs will now correctly deal damage to players (small amount and armor only). *Whips will properly attack grenades again. *Reduced network usage for updating infestation (thanks matso!). *reserve Fade velocity when coming out of blink. *Improved spit effect to look less 'spritey'. *Don't create new material instance when the default material matches the friction/restitution settings (physics). Sound *Added private 2D sound effect for when a player is distress beaconed to ensure they always hear this effect. *Better alien vision sounds. *Better commander scan sound. *Better powernode destroyed sound. *Fixed ARC fire sound. *Hooked up Mine sounds: Drop, Warmup, Explode. *Hooked up new Alien tooltip sound effect. *Hooked up private 2D sound for when a player teleports through the Phase Gate (so they hear this effect better). SDK *Added support for the Lua IO library (file names use special prefixes "game://", "user://", "temp://", and "cache://" to determine where they are located in the file system). *Changed console command for collision rep visualization to 'collision'. *Cull physics/collision debug drawing to view frustum. *PhysX scene visualization (using the 'physics' console command). *Table.contains will now return the key of the element when found. category:Patches